On the verge of discovering a new force of nature?

On the verge of discovering a new force of nature?

 

As we run around our humdrum lives, largely oblivious to the nature of reality around us, only observing a a minuscule portion of this version of reality called our universe, there are forces shaping all that we can see, touch, experience, and then everything else that we cannot.

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_force) – “In physics, there are four observed fundamental interactions (also known as fundamental forces) that form the basis of all known interactions in nature: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces.” So, all of the forces we experience every day can be reduced to just four categories: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force, and now some physicists say they have found possible signs of a fifth fundamental force of nature.

The search for a fifth force has increased in recent decades due to two discoveries in cosmology that are not explained by current theories. It has been discovered that most of the mass of the universe is accounted for by an unknown form of matter called dark matter. Most physicists believe that dark matter consists of new, undiscovered subatomic particles, but some believe that it could be related to an unknown fundamental force. Second, it has also recently been discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, which has been attributed to a form of energy called dark energy. Some physicists speculate that a form of dark energy called quintessence could be a fifth force.

The findings come from physicists at Fermilab, the US Department of Energy Office’s national laboratory.

According to Silicon Repulic – (https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/force-of-nature-physics) – “In the Muon g-2 experiment, the scientists exposed muons to an intense magnetic field by sending them around a 50-foot-diameter magnetised ring at Fermilab. When doing this, the team found the muons wobbled in unpredictable ways, defying the fundamental theory of how particles interact.”

“This is strong evidence that the muon is sensitive to something that is not in our best theory,” said Renee Fatemi, a physicist at the University of Kentucky and the simulations manager for the Muon g-2 experiment.

We’re quite familiar with the first two forces. Gravity pins us to Earth and pulls us around the sun, while electromagnetism keeps the lights on. The other two forces are less obvious to us because they govern interactions at the tiniest scales. The strong force binds matter together, while the weak nuclear force describes the radioactive decay of atoms

The Fermilab experiment builds on a previous experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory around 20 years ago. Elsewhere, there have been other experiments hinting at a new kind of physics. Last month, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva found unstable particles that fail to decay as the standard model suggests.

However, we might find it difficult to measure this new force. Gravity, for example, is such a weak force that the gravitational interaction between two objects is only significant when one of them has a great mass. Therefore, it takes very sensitive equipment to measure gravitational interactions between objects that are small compared to a planet.

The existence of fifth and more forces, fundamental to nature, have been speculated for decades. The study of physics and the search a new force of nature, in many ways, is a search for who we are, why are we here and what is this reality all about, or even whether are other realities or planes of existence which we have been, hitherto, unaware of. Imagine, with our current standard model of cosmology, our understanding of the universe falls astonishingly short – we still don’t know all the laws of nature and furthermore, we still don’t know what constitutes almost 95% of our universe or stranger still – why is there such a massive imbalance between matter/ anti-matter. There have been false alarms of course. So we may have to wait a while before we know whether a new particle and its potential fifth force will revolutionize physics or take its place atop the dustbin of debunked and discarded discoveries such as the now-infamous cold fusion! 

Quantum physics and consciousness

Today was the day of connecting with inner self. So I spent the afternoon going through some books on consciousness and its connection with quantum physics.

For more than two hundred years Newton’s ideas dictated our world view. Newton declared that everything operates mechanically and can be predicted like clockwork. Science in Newton’s view, being nothing more than the act of observing, meant that this world view was easily perpetuated by independent observers all over the world.

In the late 19th century, science entered into the era of subatomic physics, which changed everything. Scientists discovered that the so-called ‘subatomic particles’ were not particles at all. They behaved like particles when they were measured but they traveled like waves. Quantum theory has changed everything, because what was once a mechanical, external universe has now become a web of intelligence. Science finally admits that the simple act of observing changes the result of any experiment and by extension, that the observer and the observed are not separate.

Quantum physics started in the late nineteenth century and is associated with the work of German physicist Max Planck. In the 1890's Planck set out to explain the phenomenon of blackbody radiation; the observation that the color of light emitted from an object did not change in a linear fashion to its temperature. Planck provided an explanation for the phenomenon in 1900 by postulating that light is emitted or absorbed in packets of definite size, which he called a quanta. Thus light, once considered a wave, was now being described as a particle (photon) in order to solve the riddle of blackbody radiation.

Quantum theory is also generally regarded as one of the most successful scientific theories ever formulated. But while the mathematical description of the quantum world allows the probabilities of experimental results to be calculated with a high degree of accuracy, there is no consensus on what it means in conceptual terms. The issues involved with this apparent conceptual conundrum are discussed in this article by David Pratt - Consciousness, Causality, and Quantum Physics.

According to physicist Leon Lederman there are three qualities we know about quantum theory.

1. It is counterintuitive,
2. It works,
3. It has problems.

Lederman goes on to write, "In spite of the great practical and intellectual success of quantum theory, we cannot be sure we know what the theory means." It is this ambiguity within the "hard" science of physics that has helped initiate a crisis unlike science has ever encountered. Once concerned with the motion and trajectory of particles, physics is now considering questions which would have been labeled as blasphemy throughout academic circles a hundred years ago. Now, numerous physicists are speculating about the nature of reality, the existence of consciousness, even the existence of God.

According to Pratt - According to the conventional interpretation of quantum physics not only is it impossible for us to measure a particle's position and momentum simultaneously with equal precision, a particle does not possess well-defined properties when it is not interacting with a measuring instrument. Furthermore, the uncertainty principle implies that a particle can never be at rest, but is subject to constant fluctuations even when no measurement is taking place, and these fluctuations are assumed to have no causes at all.

Simply speaking, the quantum world is believed to be characterized by absolute indeterminism, intrinsic ambiguity, and irreducible lawlessness. Most physicists are content to accept the assumption of absolute chance. This has important implications in connection with free will.

As the late physicist David Bohm (1984, p. 87) put it: "it is assumed that in any particular experiment, the precise result that will be obtained is completely arbitrary in the sense that it has no relationship whatever to anything else that exists in the world or that ever has existed."

It is widely accepted that consciousness or, more generally, mental activity is in some way correlated to the behavior of the material brain. Since quantum theory is the most fundamental theory of matter that is currently available, it is a legitimate question to ask whether quantum theory can help us to understand consciousness. Several approaches answering this question affirmatively, proposed in recent decades, have been surveyed in this excellent article - Quantum Approaches to Consciousness.

According to Mark Bancroft in Quantum Physics & Consciousness - "Quantum physics has directly challenged the meaning of matter for more than fifty years. Being defined as, "Something that occupies space and can be perceived by one or more senses; a physical body, a physical substance, or the universe as a whole.” Thus, matter may also mean the entire universe; including "'not-real' stuff". The atom was considered to be the indivisible building block of the universe up until the discovery of the electron. Now, particle physicists postulate that there are sixty-one elementary particles which make up all matter in the universe."

On a side track - Professor of Mathematical Physics, Frank Tipler, confidently proclaims that physics can and will lead to the immortality of humankind. He shares on page three of his book - The Physics of Immortality.

According to Dream Manifesto - Reality is never experienced on an exclusively personal level. The 21st century has witnessed the introduction of new ideas about how we fundamentally view reality. However, all we can know of the world in an absolute sense comes from our own sensory perceptions and the mental constructions we build around them. Behind these perceptions lies pure consciousness. Quantum physicists have shown that consciousness itself - something you have in infinite supply - is the basic stuff of the entire universe.

Quantum physics is a branch of physics which concerns itself with the study (observation) of the subatomic realm. Physics is defined as, "The science of matter and energy and of interactions between the two. Physical properties, interactions, processes, or laws. The study of the natural or material world and phenomenon." Being a scientific endeavor the above definition appears to fit with the somewhat vague definition of science.

A rather beautiful representation of quantum mechanics and consciousness is given on this website…

And before I close this entry, I must mention Fred Alan Wolf who is a physicist, writer, and lecturer who earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at UCLA in 1963. He continues to write, lecture throughout the world, and conduct research on the relationship of quantum physics to consciousness. He is the National Book Award Winning author of taking the Quantum Leap. He is a member of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Collegium of Scholars. More can be found about him on this blog… of course he also has his own blog site J there are a thousand questions which clamor my mind and one day, I intend to ask Dr. Quantum…

Extra-terrestrial origins of life?

The concept of life being a cosmic phenomenon is rapidly gaining support, with new evidence from space science, geology and biology. In this picture life on Earth resulted from the introduction of bacteria from comets, and the subsequent evolution of life required the continuing input of genes from comets.

Fred Hoyle was an important scientist who worked at the frontiers of astronomy and theoretical physics. In 1983 he published a well-illustrated popular book for nonscientists in which he attacked the whole idea that life originated and evolved on Earth and replaced it by 'intelligent cosmic control'.

Although Hoyle has been accused to siding with creationism – I personally disagree with this assessment. He was in favor of cosmic connection and control of origin of life on earth and elsewhere in universe and was not particularly hinting at any divine control.

In an interview, N Chandra Wickramasinghe, one of the foremost authority on the idea of life from outer space a student and collaborator of Sir Fred Hoyle – in the frontline – mentions that two recent experiments in the United States have once again drawn the attention of scientists to the theory of panspermia.

Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe demonstrated correctly that interstellar clouds contain some organic molecules but their subsequent proposal for the extraterrestrial origin of life on earth and for the ability of microbes to survive in space are not substantiated by hardcore evidence. However, with the hard core evidence from other quarters coming in, this theory is gaining ground and acceptance in mainstream scientific thinking.

Panspermia - which literally means seeds everywhere, underlies the hypothesis that the (biological) stuff of life did not have its origins in terrestrial resources but in inter-stellar space.

The theory maintains that life on the earth was seeded from space and that life's evolution to higher forms depends on complex genes (including those of viruses and diseases) that the earth receives from space from time to time.)

The two experiments discussed included:

In one experiment reported in October, environmental biologists Russell H. Vreeland and William D. Rosenzweig claimed that they discovered the longest surviving (250 million years) bacterial spores locked inside a salt crystal formation in Mexico that could be revived. This was considered as evidence that life - even one-celled micro-organisms - could survive in suspended animation for eons and float on comets to far away planets

In another experiment reported, a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology, Vanderbilt and McGill Universities discovered that small pieces of space rock could be transferred from Mars to earth without its interior get ting excessively heated up, thus enabling living organisms to ride in them

The renewed interest in panspermia also comes in the wake of space-based discoveries that include recent findings of some simple amino acids and sugars in inter-stellar space; the announcement by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in August 1996 of evidence of fossilized ancient life in a meteorite from Mars; evidence in the same year by geneticists that many genes are much older than what the fossil record would indicate; the discovery by a Russian microbiologist in 1998 of a micro-fossil in a meteorite was a previously unknown bacterium; and the announcement by NASA in April this year of the detection of very large organic molecules in space in its Stardust Mission launched in February and that the non-biological origins of such large molecules are not known


Early history of panspermia

Until the late 19th century panspermia meant the passage of organisms through Earth’s own atmosphere, not an incidence from outside Earth. In this form it seems to have been used first by the Abbee Lazzaro Spallanzoni (1729-99). But almost a century before that, Francesco Redi had carried out what can be seen as a classic experiment in the subject. He had shown that maggots appear in decaying meat only when the meat is exposed to air, inferring that whatever it was that gave rise to the maggots must have travelled to the meat through the air.

A very long wait until the 1860’s then ensued, until Louis Pasteur’s3 experiments on the souring of milk and the fermentation of wine showed that similar results occurred when the air-borne agents were bacteria, replicating as bacteria but not producing a visible organism like maggots. The world then permitted Pasteur to get away with a huge generalization, and honored him greatly both at the time and in history for it. Because by then the world was anxious to be done with the old Aristotelian concept of life emerging from the mixing of warm earth and morning dew. The same old concept was to arise again in the mid-twenties of the past century, however, but with a different name. Instead of Aristotle’s warm earth and morning dew it became “a warm organic soup.”

Pasteur’s far-ranging generalization implied that each generation of every plant or animal is preceded by a generation of the same plant or animal. This view was taken up enthusiastically by others, particularly by physicists, among them John Tyndall, who lectured frequently on the London scene. The editorial columns of the newly established Nature (e.g., issue of January 27, 1870) objected with some passion to Tyndall’s Friday evening discourse at the Royal Institution on January 21, 1870. Behind the objection was the realizations that were Pasteur’s paradigm taken to be strictly true, the origin of life would need to be external to Earth. For if life had no spontaneous origin, it would be possible to follow any animal generation-by-generation back to a time before Earth existed, the origin being therefore required outside Earth.

This was put in remarkably clear terms in 1874 by the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz4:

“It appears to me to be a fully correct scientific procedure, if all our attempts fail to cause the production of organisms from non-living matter, to raise the question whether life has ever arisen, whether it is not just as old as matter itself, and whether seeds have not been carried from one planet to another and have developed everywhere where they have fallen on fertile soil….”

In his presidential address to the 1881 meeting of the British Association, Lord Kelvin drew a remarkable picture:

“When two great masses come into collision in space, it is certain that a large part of each is melted, but it seems also quite certain that in many cases a large quantity of debris must be shot forth in all directions, much of which may have experienced no greater violence than individual pieces of rock experience in a landslip or in blasting by gunpowder. Should the time when this earth comes into collision with another body, comparable in dimensions to itself, be when it is still clothed as at present with vegetation, many great and small fragments carrying seeds of living plants and animals would undoubtedly be scattered through space. Hence, and because we all confidently believe that there are at present, and have been from time immemorial, many worlds of life besides our own, we must regard it as probable in the highest degree that there are countless seed-bearing meteoric stones moving about through space. If at the present instant no life existed upon Earth, one such stone falling upon it might, by what we blindly call natural causes, lead to its becoming covered with vegetation.”

Essentially, what Kelvin was suggesting at that time was it is possible for seeds of life to be carried between planetary or cosmic bodies. Thus almost 120 years ago the ideas that have recently come to the forefront of scientific discussion were already well known. Unfortunately there was no way at that date, 1881, whereby observation or experiment could be brought seriously to bear on Kelvin’s formulation of panspermia and the world had to wait 120 year before some sort of concrete experimental and observational proof started trickling in.

It has been known for quite some time that bacteria and other microorganism are extremely hardy. Some have been found to be living in the most unlikely places where conventional thinking would attribute life’s survival – such as in the heavy water of nuclear reactors or the highly acidic and hot volcanic areas. These extremophiles, i.e. microbes that live in conditions that would kill other creatures. It was not until the 1970's that such creatures were recognized, but the more researchers look, the more they discover that most archaea; some bacteria and a few protists can survive in the harshest and strangest of environments.

There is scarcely any set of conditions prevailing on Earth, no matter how extreme that is incapable of harboring some type of microbial life. Under space conditions, microorganisms are very easily protected against ultraviolet damage.

One may find it very difficult to believe but there is evidence that some of bacteria actually survived almost 2 years on moon’s harsh environment. What has happened was that during the sealing of a camera which was supposed to be sent to moon, somebody might have sneezed and hence left microbes inside the camera body. The camera in turn was delivered to moon’s surface to find best locations for landing. 2 years later when the Apollo astronauts retrieved this camera and brought it back to earth – this fact was discovered. Moon has almost no atmosphere and the range of temperature is very high indeed. if microbes can survive 2 years of almost vacuum and the harsh differences in temperatures, is it really far fetched to think that it would be possible for them to travel intra-stellar or interstellar distances and seed life on earth as well?

Couple this with the fact that today an impressive array of interstellar molecules has been detected and among the list are a host of hydrocarbons, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, the amino acid glycine, vinegar and the sugar glycoaldehyde14. Such organic molecules that pervade interstellar clouds make up a considerable fraction of the available galactic carbon.

Actually, theories of how interstellar organic molecules might form via non-biological processes are still in their infancy and, in terms of explaining the available facts, they leave much to be desired.

N Chandra Wickramasinghe further speculates – “The overwhelming bulk of organic matter on Earth is indisputably derived from biology, much of it being degradation products of biology. Might not the same processes operate in the case of interstellar organic molecules? The polyaromatic hydrocarbons that are so abundant in the cosmos could have a similar origin to the organic pollutants that choke us in our major cities - products of degradation of biology, biologically generated fossil fuels in the urban case, cosmic microbiology in the interstellar clouds. The theory of cosmic panspermia that we have proposed leads us to argue that interstellar space could be a graveyard of cosmic life as well as its cradle. Only the minutest fraction (less than one part in a trillion) of the interstellar bacteria needs to retain viability, in dense shielded cloudlets of space, for panspermia to hold sway. Common sense dictates that this survival rate is unavoidable.”

So where does this leads us? Actually, to me this is a partial answer at best. While it may be indisputably established that life did not independently evolve here on earth and was in fact seeded from the stars – it still leaves us clueless about the origins of life itself, wherever it might have evolved or originated.

In this sense, we are all aliens on this planet. Something to ponder on…. I will be writing more on this topic in coming days.

The GOD Particle!

In my last entry, I talked about the LHC or Large Hadron collider. One of the mission parameters of building the LHC was to find clues to or discover outright the Higgs Boson – also popularly titled the God Particle.

According to Wikipedia article – “The Higgs boson or BEH Mechanism, popularized as the "God Particle", is a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics; it is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed. Experimental observation would elucidate how otherwise massless elementary particles nevertheless manage to construct mass in matter. More specifically, the Higgs boson would explain the difference between the massless photon and the relatively massive W and Z bosons. Elementary particle masses, and the differences between electromagnetism (caused by the photon) and the weak force (caused by the W and Z bosons), are critical to many aspects of the structure of microscopic (and hence macroscopic) matter; thus, if it exists, the Higgs boson is an integral and pervasive component of the material world. “

As of yet, no experiment has directly detected the existence of the Higgs boson, but this may change as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN produces results.

Did all the information given above make any sense to you? Okay, you are not alone in having a significant challenge in understanding what elementary particle physics to scientists is literally these days J. Alright, let’s go back to the basics here.

Get physicists and cosmologists talking about their work and they will tell you that there are elegant theories and messy ones. Almost all of them believe the universe conforms to an elegant one. A central goal of today's physics, in fact, is to show that at its very beginning, the universe was ordered and unified. But this unity didn't last for long. Just instants after the Big Bang, as the explosion cooled and its contents scattered, the cosmos' forces and matter differentiated. The universe fell from a state of perfect grace into its current complexity, in a cosmic parallel to Adam and Eve.

Many great minds — Democritus, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein — took giant steps toward bringing the universe's lost unity out of hiding. In 1964, Peter Higgs, a shy scientist in Edinburgh, added his name to that list by coming up with an ingenious theory that gave scientists the tools to explain how two classes of particles, which now appear to be different, were once one and the same. His theory proposes the existence of a single particle responsible for imparting mass to all things — a speck so precious it has comes to be known as the "God particle." The scientific term for it is the Higgs boson, and to find it physicists are counting on the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, a 17-mile underground circuit that took 25 years to plan and $6 billion to build

Basically, all the known forces in the universe are manifestations of four fundamental forces, the strong, electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational forces. But why four? Why not just one master force? Those who joined the quest for a single unified master force declared that the first step toward unification had been achieved with the discovery of the discovery of the W and Z particles, the intermediate vector bosons, in 1983. This brought experimental verification of particles whose prediction had already contributed to the Nobel Prize awarded to Weinberg, Salam, and Glashow in 1979. Combining the weak and electromagnetic forces into a unified "electroweak" force, these great advances in both theory and experiment provide encouragement for moving on to the next step, the "grand unification" necessary to include the strong interaction.

One rather comic and more understandable (at least to the masses) explanation of what Higgs Boson is all about are given here. In 1993, the UK Science Minister, William Waldegrave, challenged physicists to produce an answer that would fit on one page to the question 'What is the Higgs boson, and why do we want to find it?' The winning entries can be found here.

As usual in all things related to human discoveries, there is a rumor flying around that the so called God Particle may have already been found at the Tevatron, an accelerator located outside of Chicago. This isn't the first time a story like this has circulated. Until the LHC opens, the Tevatron remains the largest accelerator in the world. Among its most significant past discoveries is another standard-model particle, the top quark. And in 2009, it will shut its doors forever. Like the LHC, the Tevatron was built with the Higgs in mind, and as time runs out for America's biggest atom smasher, some nervy experimentalists have jumped the gun. The full text of this article can be found here.

For those who like to have a little more technical details on the whole matter (pun intendedJ) can access the articles at Hyperphysics. And like everything else, human capacity for trivializing the profound and thus making it less frightening to masses has been equally at work for Higgs Boson as well. You can find “music” inspired by the god particle at the so called edge of science at the official site of Higgs Boson!

The Higgs boson has appeared in several works of fiction in popular culture. These references rarely reflect the expected properties of the hypothetical elementary particle, or do so only vaguely and often imbue it with fantastic properties. The curious and long list of such fiction works can be accessed via this article!

There is more serious stuff at the scientific American on the questions related to Higgs Boson.

All the theories apart, to me the search for this ultimate particle is part of the overall quest of humankind to understand itself and its origins. We are, after all, made of star stuff. All that constitutes us was once manufactured in the nuclear furnaces of old and giant stars scattered throughout the cosmos. I find this quest irresistible.

Next, I’ll be talking about the wave-particle duality… watch out for this space :-)

Doomsday Machine –Large Hadron Collider (LHC): Is end of the world near?

As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) nears completion and commissioning, there are wild talks and even protests about its potential impact on the world and the universe in general.

But what is LHC and what is the reason behind the human Endeavour to build a machine such as this or monstrosity as it is being called by some.

As put in science daily – “Particle colliders creating black holes that could devour the Earth. Sounds like a great Hollywood script. But, according to UC Santa Barbara Physics Professor Steve Giddings, it's pure fiction”.

So come, explore with me the conundrum behind arguably perhaps the greatest scientific effort by humankind and I really say human kind and not an individual since this work is being conducted by an international team – making it a truly human Endeavour rather than a work of a single intellectual giant like Einstein, Newton, etc… The LHC is the world's largest and the highest-energy particle accelerator. It is funded and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.

What is Large Hadron Collider or LHC?

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground and is being built in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference. The tunnel is buried around 50 to 175 m. underground. It straddles the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionize our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.

The idea of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began in the early 1980s. The first approval of the project by the CERN Council occurred in December 1994 and the first civil engineering construction work began in April 1998.

You can take a photo tour of LHC by clicking here

There is another very good collection of LHC related photographs at the Big Picture.

A graphical display of all components of LHC can be found here.

Complete workings of LHC can be found at CERN Site.

Why is LHC needed?

If we are to believe the scientists – this is all related to unfinished business of Newton and perhaps Einstein as well. Newton told us what the effects of gravitation are and how to calculate the effects. But told nothing about the nature of gravity – what is it after all and what causes it?

Einstein went a step further and combined Space and time. And then went on to explain gravity as the after effect of large mass curving space-time. This is all fine, but it still doesn’t tell us what gives us mass at all?

And it is here that we ask the crucial question - What is the origin of mass? Why do tiny particles weigh the amount they do? Why do some particles have no mass at all? At present, there are no established answers to these questions. The most likely explanation may be found in the Higgs boson, a key undiscovered particle that is essential for the Standard Model to work. First hypothesized in 1964, it has yet to be observed. The ATLAS and CMS experiments will be actively searching for signs of this elusive particle.

Everything we see in the Universe, from an ant to a galaxy, is made up of ordinary particles. These are collectively referred to as matter, forming 4% of the Universe. Dark matter and dark energy are believed to make up the remaining proportion, but they are incredibly difficult to detect and study, other than through the gravitational forces they exert. Investigating the nature of dark matter and dark energy is one of the biggest challenges today in the fields of particle physics and cosmology.

What does this machine do? Well, in LHC, two beams of subatomic particles called 'hadrons' – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyze the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC

When activated, it is theorized that the LHC - collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model of physics and could explain, as I mentioned earlier, how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity.

The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared to the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized particles, models and states might be produced, and for some searches are planned, including super symmetric particles, compositeness (Technicolor), extra dimensions, strangelets, micro black holes and magnetic monopoles.

The ATLAS and CMS experiments will look for super symmetric particles to test a likely hypothesis for the make-up of dark matter.

It will also help us in explaining the bias found in nature of matter over anti-matter. More specifically, it will help us in answering as to why there is no anti-matter. We live in a world of matter – everything in the Universe, including ourselves, is made of matter. Antimatter is like a twin version of matter, but with opposite electric charge. At the birth of the Universe, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been produced in the Big Bang. But when matter and antimatter particles meet, they annihilate each other, transforming into energy. Somehow, a tiny fraction of matter must have survived to form the Universe we live in today, with hardly any antimatter left. Why does Nature appear to have this bias for matter over antimatter?

The LHCb experiment will be looking for differences between matter and antimatter to help answer this question. Previous experiments have already observed a tiny behavioral difference, but what has been seen so far is not nearly enough to account for the apparent matter–antimatter imbalance in the Universe.

I’ll be writing more about the Higgs Boson or the “GOD PARTICLE” in my next entry. But if you are interested in reading more about it – follow this link.

It will also help us in answering whether there are other hidden dimensions. We are able to sense the common 3-dimensions and now with the help of Einstein also – time. Einstein showed that the three dimensions of space are related to time. Subsequent theories propose that further hidden dimensions of space may exist; for example, string theory implies that there are additional spatial dimensions yet to be observed. These may become detectable at very high energies, so data from all the detectors will be carefully analyzed to look for signs of extra dimensions.

So what’s the problem?

Okay, it sounds pretty fancy stuff, but hardly the case for paranoia being displayed by some groups of scientists and merrily being covered by our usual sensationalist media :-)

The main problem with the whole project is - Nobody knows for sure what is going to happen (off course there are several theories that are being tested).

Of course there is wide agreement that one of the sub products could be small black holes (tiny, mini, and minuscule). after that, most scientists (by most here I mean almost everyone in the planet) believe that, if these black holes happen to exist, they would “disappear” due to a series of very complicated reasons or, if they stay, it would take them several billion years before they grow to “eat” the earth.

A quite small number of scientists (allegedly 1 or 2 or the groups surrounding them), believes that this black holes would grow and fast, so they would end eating the earth in 50 months and, although the probability is not easily quantified, does the gravity of the potential result deserves to put the experiment on hold until a proper discussion takes places within the scientific community?

The concerns of this group were understood and addressed by CERN and dismissed. CERN actually used the research of Professor Steve Giddings, of UC Santa Barbara. Giddings has co-authored a paper documenting his study of the safety of microscopic black holes that might possibly be produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is nearing completion in Europe. The paper, co-authored by Michelangelo Mangano of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), which is building the world's largest particle collider, investigates hypothesized behavior of tiny black holes that might be created by high-energy collisions in the CERN particle accelerator.

As quoted in Science daily - The Giddings/Mangano study concludes that such microscopic black holes would be harmless. In fact, he added, nature is continuously creating LHC-like collisions when much higher-energy cosmic rays collide with the Earth's atmosphere, with the Sun, and with other objects such as white dwarfs and neutron stars. If such collisions posed a danger, the consequences for Earth or these astronomical objects would have become evident already, Giddings said.

Two major lawsuits have been initiated and quashed as far as I can understand (remember, I am not a lawyer either). One in the European Court of Human Rights and other in the US Federal District Court in Honolulu. The first sought an emergency injunction based on the experiment violating the right to life of European citizens and pose a threat to the rule of law, and the second tried to force the U.S. government to withdraw its participation in the experiment. It is important to note that the European Court of Human Rights rejected the request for the injunction but will hear the case (after the experiment has started). The status of US case is unknown at this moment.

Personally, I do not think that LHC is a threat to universe and humanity. Personally, I think it is a great conceit on humanity’s part if we think collectively that building a 27 km long tunnel and smashing a few atoms can trigger a universal collapse back to the state which existed prior to Big Bang. Although I am not a qualified high energy physicist, I do recall a similar scare during the time of the Manhattan Project – or the A-Bomb project of USA during 1940’s. At that time also, nobody was sure of what would happen when an atomic bomb went off. There were wild theories – mostly in public media and imagination and the most fanciful one that I recall is related to whole of earth’s atmosphere being burned off due to chain reaction set off by the exploding bomb.

Of course it never happened that way – our presence here is a testimony to that.

I do, however, acknowledge this hullaballoo as a classic case of failure of science to communicate to the masses. The media is doing what it does usually – sensationalizing the issue beyond reason.

Let’s look forward to a new era in scientific break through and new understandings of our reality as well new technologies. Remember – there wouldn’t TV if not for quantum mechanics, No GPS if not for Einstein and Newton!

Origin of universe and beginnings of life

Origin of the Universe - What's the Latest Theory?
When it comes to the origin of the universe, the "Big Bang Theory" and its related Inflation Universe Theories (IUTs) are today's dominant scientific school of thought. According to these interrelated notions, the universe was created between 13 and 20 billion years ago from the random, cosmic explosion (or expansion) of a subatomic ball that hurled space, time, matter and energy in all directions. Everything - the whole universe -- came from an initial speck of infinite density (also known as a "singularity"). This speck (existing outside of space and time) appeared from no where, for no reason, only to explode (start expanding) all of a sudden. Although this sounds contrary to our common sense everyday notions of what is possible or not, however, as has been frequently noted by men of science over centuries, the universe need not be in line with human expectations of common sense. Ok, I digress a little bit. Back to the original theme… over a period of billions of years, this newly created space, time, matter and energy evolved into remarkably-designed and fully-functional stars, galaxies and planets, including our earth.

Here's what the experts are saying about the origin of the universe:

NASA: "In the more than 70 years since the discovery that that the Universe is expanding, we have made some significant steps in understanding how the Universe began and how it must have evolved to be what it is today. We know this: galaxies and clusters of galaxies formed from tiny fluctuations in the early Universe. We can measure these fluctuations by mapping the cosmic background radiation and relate them to the structures which we observe today. However, many challenges remain…"
(http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/mysteries_l1/origin_destiny.html)

UC Berkeley: "The big bang theory states that at some time in the distant past there was nothing. A process known as vacuum fluctuation created what astrophysicists call a singularity. From that singularity, which was about the size of a dime, our Universe was born."
(http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/Education/IUP/Big_Bang_Primer.html)

University of Michigan: "About 15 billion years ago a tremendous explosion started the expansion of the universe. This explosion is known as the Big Bang. At the point of this event all of the matter and energy of space was contained at one point. What existed prior to this event is completely unknown and is a matter of pure speculation. This occurrence was not a conventional explosion but rather an event filling all of space with all of the particles of the embryonic universe rushing away from each other."
(http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm)

PBS: There was an "initial explosion" of a "primordial atom which had contained all the matter in the universe."
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dp27bi.html)

Origin of Life - What's the latest theory?

When it comes to the origin of life, "evolutionary theory" is still the foundation of today's scientific worldview. The conventional school text books teach that organic life sprung from non-organic matter exclusively through a natural mechanistic process on a pre-biotic earth. There is another school of thought that comets brought the necessary elements of life to earth and kick-started this whole process. To my mind, this is just skirting the issue. Even if comets did bring elements of life from extra-terrestrial, indeed extra-solar sources, life, in the end, had to originate somewhere. If not on earth, then somewhere else… in that sense, we are all, everything on earth, aliens in a manner of speaking… I digress again and apologies for that.

Back to the main theme of origins. That original life form then evolved into more complex life forms through a natural process of random mutations and natural selection. In a nutshell, the majority scientific hypothesis is that matter randomly acting on matter for a long period of time created everything we see. Although there are several holes in this theory as well.

Consider the highly evolved sense of echo location in bats. According to the theory, it would imply that that in response to the necessity of finding food during the dead of night, bats evolved this capability. However, if one looks closely, then there are several serious problems… how did the bats evolve both ultrasonic equipment to generate the sound waves and the ears to catch them back along with necessary brain capacity to process all of the information. Even today, doing that requires high level technology in form of radars and ultrasonic capabilities by humans and it wasn’t developed until Second World War… evolutionary theory does not adequately explain simultaneous evolution of higher order features in animals, let alone the origin of life itself. But that’s the best we’ve got…

However, there are serious questions… How can nothing explode? Where did all that matter and energy come from? What caused its release? How did this explosion of everything (from nothing) order itself? How can simplicity become complexity? Where did the chemical elements come from? Where did the mathematical laws and physical properties come from? How do we explain the design, complexity and fine-tuning inherent in spiral galaxies, solar systems, and stars? Questions such as these are pushed into the realm of meta-physics and avoided at best by the current scientific establishments. Religions, of course, have the simple answer – GOD or some other being answering to that description created this entire out of nothing, or his thigh or some other part. I do not wish to be irreverent or blasphemous but find all this just a plain way of saying – folks – although we seem to have microwaves, television, seem to be able to send out spacecrafts to other planets – we are still largely ignorant about the reality around us and how it came about.

The mad dash to find ever more number of elementary particles – does not seem to have an end. With ever more powerful colliders, we seem to find more and more elementary particles… we are getting besides the point again… habit of mine – opens up multiple threads of thought and execution simultaneously.

How did life come from an inorganic soup? How did the bacteria come about? How did a bird come from a lizard? Why don't we see birds come from lizards today? Why are there no transitional fossils in our museums today, the so called missing links? Why have we never observed beneficial mutations? Where did the information code in DNA come from? Where did the language convention that interprets DNA come from? How can we explain the random development of the human eye, reproductive system, digestive tract, brain, heart and lungs? What about the subconscious mind? What about love, morality, ethics, and emotions? Can these things really evolve gradually and randomly over time? By the way, I am in no way affiliated with or subscribe to – intelligent design philosophy. Never have, never will. Imagine if the question relating to terrestrial biology can be so difficult and mind boggling, what about extra-terrestrial biology, and beings? But first I wanted to get my head cleared up on terrestrial biology and open up the website – Google! This is one thing about the internet that I love. Google has turned the internet as it was supposed to be. Near instantaneous searchable repository of world information.

I opened the site on tree of life. The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. On more than 9000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics. I opened one on life on earth, and was stunned by the first page I saw. They say and I quote - “The rooting of the Tree of Life, and the relationships of the major lineages, are controversial. The monophyly of Archaea is uncertain, and recent evidence for ancient lateral transfers of genes indicates that a highly complex model is needed to adequately represent the phylogenetic relationships among the major lineages of Life.”

Behind a lot of poppycock and scientific jargon hides the fact that they don’t know it yet! Regardless of any theoretical problems with the tree itself, what about all the evolutionary processes required to get to the first simple life forms at the bottom of the chart in the first place? This seems to be a big mystery and while there are debates, they mostly border on the Meta part of it rather than actual solid physics or biology. We seem to understand a lot of rules which shape the nature as we understand it today, but nothing about how these rules came about and more importantly why…

Watch out for this space... i'll be back with some more thoughts - profound and profane, both :-)